I wanted to love Contagion so much. After all Steven Soderbergh was directing, it has a top notch cast including Matt Damon, Kate Winslett, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Elliott Gould and Gwyneth Paltrow. Years before Sir Ridley Scott had tried to do a serious take on how a real life epidemic would start, spread and infect a global population with The Hot Zone, but the movie failed to materialise. And that left us with the frighteningly bullshit Outbreak to single handed carry the killer disease genre for two decades. It was time someone did it properly.
Unfortunately Soderbergh only gets it half right. Technically Contagion is fascinating, tracking in a realistic fashion, the spreading of an unknown killer disease from one individual (Paltrow) to millions of people worldwide, and the subsequent efforts of families, journalists, scientists and politicians to deal with the threat as it explodes into day to day living. Where it surprisingly stumbles is on the human level. All the stories (many of the characters don't even meet) are decent enough in their own right, whether it's Damon's protective father, Law's crusading blogger or Cotillard's kidnapped researcher...but none of the stories ever real amount to much, and so neither does the film narrative as a whole. Yes the whole film does have a rather gloomy, apocalyptic in-built tension as the human species seems in mortal danger, but it dissipates in the final third leaving the audience with a 'so what' kind of feeling.
Miles better than Outbreak, thank Odin, but still a missed opportunity.
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